Real-Life Horror: Shooter Slays 12 At DarkKnight Screening

Police are pictured outside of a Century 16 movie theatre where as many as 14 people were killed and many injured at a shooting during the showing of a movie at the in Aurora, Colo., Friday, July 20, 2012. Photo: Ed Andrieski/AP

The brutality of Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City became horrifyingly real during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado as a gunman burst into the theater and murdered at least 12 people. And at least some in the theater initially thought the incident was part of the show.

Information about the massacre is still sketchy, but what’s emerged so far is that a man wearing body armor and carrying a rifle burst into the ninth theater at the Central 16 cineplex in the Denver suburb. Entering from the emergency exit, he threw what police described as two gas canister before beginning a shooting spree that wounded 71 people — at least 12 fatally, 10 of whom died in the movie theater.

According to Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates, a 24-year old man, James Eagan Holmes, was armed with a .40-caliber Glock pistol; an AR-15 assault rifle; and a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun. He was heavily armored, wearing a black ballistic helmet, vest, groin and neck protection, leggings, gloves and a gas mask. His car was parked in the back of the cineplex and contained a second Glock. Police responded to the scene within 90 seconds of receiving the first 911 calls and subdued Holmes in the back of the theater without harm to officers.

Another moviegoer in Theater 8, Alex Milano, told a reporter that “loud bangs and smoke took over the right of the theater.” Before he realized he was under attack, Milano said he and a friend thought, “Special effects, midnight showing, that’s awesome, what theater does that anymore.” But when he saw “something come through the wall, multiple objects flow through the wall,” he dropped his younger sister and himself to the ground and spirited them out of the movie.

Jacob Stevens, 18, hugs his mother Tammi Stevens after being interview by police outside Gateway High School where witness were brought for questioning after a shooting at a movie theater. Photo: Barry Gutierrez/AP

The social-media fracas even prompted an area man who shares a name with the suspect to compose a Facebook post explaining, “I am not a 24-year old gun-slinging killer.” Already, a Facebook group assembled urging the “death penalty” for a suspect who as of yet has not been charged with the crime. Aurora Police Chief Oates urged people exercise caution when discussing the massacre on social media.

On the other end of the spectrum, the survivors of the attack also shared their experiences on social media. One Redditor, calling himself themurderator, posted pictures — warning: graphic — of what he described as his gunshot wounds from the Aurora shooting. One of the victims who did not survive, Jessica Ghawi, an aspiring sportswriter, was a survivor of a recent Toronto shooting that she described in a blog post.

While fears of sophisticated domestic terrorism have circulated since 9/11 — Nolan plays off them in his Batman trilogy — most mass killings in the United States still typically rely on a single individual or small group of people using assault weapons. From the Littleton Colorado shootings of 1999; to the D.C. area sniper rampage of 2002; to the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007; to Maj. Nidal Hassan’s Fort Hood attack in 2009, this pattern has held. The “complex attacks” familiar to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan — so-called because they combine insurgent tactics, such as homemade bomb explosions with small-arms or rocket fire — have still not migrated back to the United States. But Aurora might be an intended exception.

As of 11 a.m. EST, TV news reported that police on the scene have evacuated buildings near Holmes’ apartment building because of suspicions the building is booby-trapped. MSNBC is saying Holmes himself, in custody, told police about the suspected boobytraps himself. Oates described the apparent boobytraps inside Holmes’ Aurora apartment as “incendiary devices” and “chemical devices, linked together with a lot of wires. As a layman, it’s not something I’ve ever seen before.”

Should these boobytraps go off outside a controlled detonation, then that would probably count as a rare complex attack inside the United States. Police have surrounded Holmes’ building, described as containing incendiary or explosive material, as of this writing. The Denver Post reports the chemicals are contained within plastic bottles wired together.

Sophisticated terrorist attacks like 9/11, where multiple teams of terrorists synchronize an assault, remain the exception, not the rule. It’s notable as well that the homegrown attacks encouraged by the web magazine of al-Qaida’s Yemen offshoot are more grandiose than killing moviegoers; none have manifested yet.

The U.S. Army, concerned over speculation that the shooter might have been a veteran — and eager to stifle the meme of the psychotic veteran before it spread — felt compelled to email that a database check of the suspect resulted in “no evidence suggest[ing] this individual served in the Army.” A Pentagon statement later on Friday added that Holmes was “not a past or current member of any branch or component of the U.S. Armed Forces.”

Spokespeople for Buckley Air Force Base, near to Aurora, said servicemembers were among the wounded — four of them, two from the Air Force and two from the Navy, according to NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski.

Two active-duty servicemembers died from their wounds: sailor John Larimer and Air Force reservist Jesse Childress; so did Navy veteran Jonathan T. Blunk.

Police in Aurora are joined by 100 FBI agents and 25 more investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. While law enforcement believes Holmes acted alone, the FBI’s Jim Yacone told reporters that his agents were “trying to run leads that span beyond Colorado at this point.”

“At this point, we do not see a nexus to terrorism,” Yacone added, but cautioned that the investigation is in its early stages.

Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film is based in part on the 1993 comic-book saga “Knightfall,” in which the psychopathic villain Bane subjects Gotham City to a campaign of escalating violence as a plot to lure out and cripple an exhausted Batman. In Aurora, the story came far too close to reality.

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